Eventually Gideon was ordered by Moscow Center to make plans for his emigration to the USA. He managed to persuade them that it was too risky, and the emigration plan was aborted. Instead he was appointed the KGB illegal resident in Canada, responsible for running other illegal agents throughout Canada. The new responsibilities were arduous. Gideon, who was in any case a lazy man, had to spend long hours receiving messages on his radio, and to make endless journeys throughout Canada to collect intelligence. Gideon began to fall behind on his schedule, and was bullied by his controllers. Finally he decided to confess everything to his lover and together they decided to approach the RCMP.
Terry Guernsey, with his instinctive feel for the importance of the case, immediately decided to run Gideon on as a double agent, rather than accept him as a defector. The decision seemed well justified when Gideon was given control of an illegal agent working for the Russians on the Canadian Avro Arrow Aircraft program. For a year the RCMP monitored Gideon as if he were a laboratory specimen. The workings of Soviet illegals were virtually unknown in the West. Guernsey carefully logged the tradecraft the Russians used for Gideon, the way he was instructed to gather intelligence, the dead letter drops he used; most important of all, the RCMP monitored all his coded radio communications.
Everything went well until the summer of 1955, when suddenly Gideon was recalled to Russia by his controller for extensive debriefing. After initial hesitation, the double agent decided to make the journey. He never returned. The RCMP waited for months and years for a sign that Gideon had survived. But they heard nothing. After a while, transmissions from Moscow to Canada began again on Gideon's cipher, suggesting that a replacement agent had arrived, but months of fruitless searching by the RCMP failed to uncover him. The case, which had promised so much in its early stages, was finally closed down by a weary Guernsey. He was convinced that something serious had gone wrong in the case, but it was impossible to put a finger on what it was, still less investigate it. Bennett, his assistant, was convinced that Gideon had fallen under Russian control and that the case was being run on to deceive the RCMP.
Reading the files it was clear to me the case bore all the hallmarks of Russian interference from an early stage, but beyond that there was little I could suggest. Then I came across a detail in the case which struck a chord. Although Gideon was an illegal agent, the Russians still required him to make very occasional meetings with a legal diplomat from the Russian Embassy, almost certainly the Illegal Support Officer. The probable reason for these meetings was that the KGB believed Gideon to be such a difficult and unreliable agent that only face-to-face meetings would ensure he was kept on the right track. During one of these meetings, which were covered by the RCMP, a furious row broke out between Gideon and his controller. Gideon had been missing his broadcasts from Moscow and failing to respond. Gideon claimed that he had been unable to receive the messages on his radio set because the atmospheric conditions were too bad. His KGB controller was totally unimpressed. He handed Gideon a detailed list of the transmissions he had missed, complete with their times and duration, and made it clear he knew Gideon was lying. Although the Russian never specifically mentioned the fact, it was obvious to me that he must have been monitoring the broadcasts sent to Gideon inside the Embassy.
I read the report of this meeting again and again to ensure that I had understood it correctly. As I turned the crisp pages of the file I began to realize that if the KGB Illegal Support Officer in Canada monitored transmissions from Moscow, it was at least possible that his counterpart in the London Embassy would be doing the same thing. If GCHQ could be persuaded to operate flat out against the Embassy we might be able to identify the transmissions, even perhaps tentatively identify the Illegal Support Officer by correlating his movements against those of the transmissions. Once we had done that we would be in a position to put him under total surveillance in an effort to catch him meeting his agents.
As soon as I got back to London I raised the whole question with GCHQ. They listened patiently as I pleaded for more effort. But I was operating on my own. There was no great enthusiasm for the venture inside MI5 either, and although GCHQ did agree to provide a few more positions to monitor broadcasts, it was nothing like enough. I suggested GCHQ mount a major effort to locate receivers inside the Russian Embassy, just as I had earlier done over the Watcher radios. But once again my request was deemed unpractical and the subject was soon lost in the dense undergrowth of the intelligence bureaucracy.
The situation remained at stalemate until 1958, when a new case emerged which totally changed the relationship between MI5 and GCHQ. In the process it pitched Hollis into his first internal crisis and introduced him to a subject which was to dog him throughout his career.
I was sitting in my office poring over the plans for a microphone installation when I received a summons to Hollis' office. He was sitting in the armchair at one end of the conference table, holding several loose files. He looked gray and drawn. He motioned me to the chair opposite.
"I would like you to help me with a problem," he said, handing me a file. I read the contents swiftly. They were source reports from an agent named Frantisek Tisler, who evidently worked as a cipher clerk in the Czech Embassy in Washington. Tisler was being run by the FBI, and they had handed on to MI5 items of his intelligence which related to British security. Tisler claimed he had gone back to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1957 and met by chance an old friend, Colonel Pribyl, who at the time was also on leave from his posting to London as the Military Attache. They had got drunk and Pribyl told Tisler that he was running an important spy in Britain, a man named Linney, who was designing simulators for use in a guided-missile project for the RAF. It had not taken long for MI5 to locate the spy. Attached to the Tisler source report was a copy of Linney's Personal File entry in the MI5 Registry. He was a senior engineer working in the Miles Aircraft Development Laboratory at Shoreham in Sussex, where he had total access to the operational and performance details of the missiles.
"I don't see the problem, sir. Why don't we place him under surveillance, and arrest him when he next makes a meet with Pribyl?"
"This is the problem," said Hollis grimly, handing me an additional sheet of paper.
It was a letter to Hollis from J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, typed on Hoover's personal italicized typewriter. The letter outlined another, much more serious allegation made by Tisler. He claimed that Pribyl had also told him that he knew the Russians had a spy inside MI5 in London. Pribyl had discovered this when he was debriefing an important agent in a car traveling through the streets of London. He became aware that he was being followed by a vehicle, which he presumed to be an MI5 Watcher car, and took evasive action to throw the car off. Anxious to ensure that the identity of his agent had not been blown, he decided to contact his Russian opposite number, Colonel Rogov, for help. Rogov told him that it would take a day or two to check, but eventually he was able to reassure Pribyl that although a Watcher car had followed him, it had given up the chase, as they believed he was just giving a driving lesson to a colleague. Rogov also told him that he should be aware of the fact that the MI5 Watcher service had recently changed tactics, and instead of openly tailing diplomats as soon as they left their embassies, they were picking them up on the bridges across the Thames, where countersurveillance was more difficult.